Jane Jacobs is rightly lauded as an urban planning pioneer. As early as 1961, she sagely articulated what makes the modern city vibrant—its diverse mashup of ethnicities, ages, industries, and cultures, all continually learning how to live together. As an accidental leader, she organized a coalition of New York City residents in a 10-year sustained effort to successfully defeat the powerful urban planner Robert Moses and his plan to run a highway through Manhattan and destroy Greenwich Village.

Library of Congress; photograph by Phil Stanziola.

Jane Jacobs at a press conference in 1961.

How can we learn from this resident, mother, wife, and writer, who developed into a bold, resilient leader? I was so intrigued by the parallels between her campaign and modern approaches to urgent complex problems that I developed a framework based on her work that I call “Move to the Edge, and Declare It Center.” Four core actions, Move, Edge, Declare, Center, add up to a leadership and operational practice you can use to lead your organization through challenges that require unknown solutions.

Complexity theorists have a handy way of distinguishing complex from complicated. Complicated problems are ones like building an airplane—it has millions of parts, but they interact in predictable ways. You work to optimize efficiency and execute to known standards. On the other hand, complex problems are ones like climate change and artificial intelligence, that have millions of elements that interact in unexpected and unpredictable ways. To manage a complex problem you must optimize for experimentation, diverse perspectives, and fast learning cycles in the absence of accepted standards. If as a leader you manage a complex problem using a complicated method, you head into a minefield of unintended consequences.

The full narrative of Jane Jacobs’ tactics in battling Robert Moses has been detailed beautifully in articles and in the movie Citizen Jane (2017). Here I summarize her essential strategy and tactics so that they can be applied to modern challenges:

1. Declare: In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs declared, “What kind of problems are cities? Cities are problems of organized complexity.” Unlike Moses, she correctly understood that the problem was complex. She didn’t start out with a solution to stopping Moses’ downtown highway, but she believed that organized complexity implied that diverse, local residents had to be part of the solution.

As a leader start by declaring a desired outcome, vision, or problem you want to solve, even if you don’t know the path to get there. Shift from needing to know the answer to inviting others to join in.

2. Edge: Jacobs had her vision, but she didn’t know if her neighbors would be equally motivated to stop the highway. So, she moved to the edge of her knowledge and tested her hypotheses. She surveyed the block she lived on, then adjacent blocks, her neighborhood, then adjacent neighborhoods. As a result, she built a diverse coalition and gathered data that would be critical in the next phase. In contrast, Robert Moses was blind to getting residents' input, a weakness that proved crucial.